Portable music players and portable telephones are becoming increasingly common. Owners of these and similar devices often prefer to use them in conjunction with personal sound delivery devices, such as headphones or earbuds. These devices are worn, for example, while driving (e.g. telephone headset), exercising, traveling, studying, or the like.
Nearly all music players and portable phones have standard earbuds as an accessory, including standard Ear Interfaces that often do not stay in the user's ears or become uncomfortable over time or do a poor job of blocking ambient sounds.
A proper fitting Ear Interface can provide the benefit of ambient noise isolation or suppression similarly to how earplugs block sound. However, the Ear Interfaces of standard earbuds often do not fit well enough to accomplish this.
In an attempt to address the above described standard Ear Interface fit problems, some companies offer kits of different size earbud adapters. The user selects, through a process of trial and error, the earbud adapter with an Ear Interface that fits his ear the best. While the probability of a better fit is thus increased, it is still inadequate because the variation in human ear anatomy is too great to be accommodated with a kit of Ear Interfaces that is necessarily limited in its range of shapes and sizes. Furthermore, this approach requires the user to try on each earbud adapter and determine, sometimes over several hours use, if its Ear Interface provides the best fit. Finally, once the adapter with the optimal Ear Interface is selected, the remaining adapters are useless and this results in material waste.
Some companies provide an earbud adapter comprising a single flexible Ear Interface where the user is able to adjust its shape and size; an elastic material (typically some sort of foam) is compressed and inserted into the ear canal. The material then expands to conform to the inner surfaces of the user's ear canal anatomy. This flexibility or compliance partially addresses the above mentioned problems with kits, but the extent of the flexibility or compliance is necessarily limited to provide optimal results for a small range of anatomy centered on the average ear. When purchasing this product, the user will typically not know in advance whether his ears will fall within the range of the adapter's accommodation. If his ears fall outside that range, the resulting pressure will likely result in pain at locations known as pain points within the ear.
To solve the above mentioned problems, other companies supply full custom earbuds or earbud adapters. They do this by first injecting a soft material into the user's ear to form a physical impression or mold. The mold supplies the ear shape information that is then used to manufacture a full custom fitted Ear Interface portion of the earbud or earbud adapter. While this full custom approach would seem to solve the problems outlined above, there remains a number of inadequacies:                A significant amount of skilled labor is required elevating, the production cost.        Production costs are further increased because the full custom approach necessarily precludes mass production.        The user must undergo the molding process which can be uncomfortable, scary, and time consuming.        Also, the user must wait at least several business days while the full custom solution is built and shipped.        The mold material, once injected into the ear, exerts a small pressure on the ear tissues as it solidifies. Some of the ear tissues are soft and are deformed by this pressure. The resulting custom ear adapter, when inserted into the ear, will therefore deform those ear tissues possibly leading to discomfort, especially when the adapter is in the ear for longer intervals.        In the process of manufacturing the adapter based on information provided by the mold, the skilled technician must interpret the mold; the mold may have had bubbles on its surface or may show visual evidence, detectable to the expert eye, of not having been in contact with the ear while it was solidifying. The skilled technician must then modify the adapter accordingly.        If the Ear Interface portion does not fit perfectly, a manual adjustment may be needed wherein a skilled technician erodes its shape, typically using a rotary grinder such as a Dremel tool, to relieve pressure on the known pain points within the ear such as the Crus of Helix, the Tragus, the Anti-Tragus and the Anti-Helix.        
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.